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Raider Nation

Save for a few good years in the early aughts, the Oakland Raiders have been middling or worse for so long that the franchise, still led by infamous owner Al Davis, has become little more than a caricature. You’ve got Chris Berman going on each week about the “Ray-Dahs,” and then there are those absurd, terrifyingfans.

From the very beginning, as the also-ran team in the Bay Area, representing an industrial multi-racial town lying a couple of bridges away from a gentrified cultural capital, the Raiders appealed to underclasses. In the seventies, when the team was half African-American, the stands in the Coliseum were equally black and white, and the tailgating parties the players joined in on after every game in the parking lots were always multiracial—white, black, Asian. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale were huge Raider fans (as were the local, Sonny Barger-led chapter of the Hell’s Angels).